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#relativity#https#heavy#elements#gold#speed#electron#org#physics#color

Discussion (19 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

kristianp•about 2 hours ago
> The increased nuclear mass causes orbiting electrons to speed up to a significant fraction of the speed of light, where the rules of Einstein’s theory of relativity are important.

> In the relativistic regime, an electron’s spin — the magnetic moment that points either up or down — and the electron’s orbit are no longer independent of each other, a state known as spin-orbit coupling.

Interesting stuff. I've never heard of sigma or pi bonds.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aei1285

nanolith•about 1 hour ago
Wait... wasn't it already understood that relativity influences electron orbits of heavy elements? I clearly remember being taught some of this in physics, in the mid-noughties.

For instance, we know that gold gets its color from relativistic effects.

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/s3

Diogenesian•about 1 hour ago
Seems to be the first time this was confirmed via direct experimental observation of the orbitals:

  “This idea that relativity is important in heavy elements has been around since the 1970s,” said Lai-Sheng Wang, a professor of chemistry at Brown and the study’s corresponding author. “But we show direct spectroscopic evidence that what we learned in high school about chemical bonding isn’t true in heavy elements."
762236•22 minutes ago
Gold electrons at inner orbits travel at a large fraction of the speed of light, which is why gold isn't a silver color. That is really neat.
ThrowawayTestr•about 1 hour ago
There's even a Wikipedia page for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry
Svoka•about 2 hours ago
For context: this is one more experimental confirmation of Dirac's equations (incorporating special relativity into quantum physics).

Very cool.

The paper PDF: https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.brown.edu/dist/0/196/fil...

cyberax•about 2 hours ago
Relativity is also responsible for a lot of weird behaviors of heavy elements, such as the color of gold. Or that lead is a good material for batteries.